Wednesday, June 8, 2016

For much of my life the chair was only a rumor, one of the many
stories my mother told about her mother, May Reid Gilpin, who died suddenly
weeks shy of her thirty-second birthday, leaving Vera, my mother, age five;
Gertrude, my aunt, age nine, and my grandfather, William.

On that October afternoon in 1917, the family, for all intents
and purposes, fractured. Needing to continue his work for the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, a job that required him to travel from time to time, William
found family members to take care of the girls. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles
made room for the three of them, but they were rarely all together.

Furniture and household belongings were not a priority, so the
chair, the sole household item left from the family, ended up with Uncle Jim,
then with his daughter, Ruth, and there it stayed for seventy years.

From time to time my mother would ask about it, and Ruth would
say that it was in bad shape and that she was going to refinish it, but that
never seemed to happen. Then, sadly, when Ruth was dying of cancer, she asked
my parents to clean out her house, and there was the chair in the basement, and
yes, indeed, it was in poor shape. All the upholstery was gone, the springs
were rusted, and the frame was broken.

My father began to work on it, removing the springs and what was
left of the upholstery, securing the frame, and stripping the finish. So when I
inherited it, there was a framework but nothing else.

Not being as handy as my
father, I decided to take it to the professionals at M. Demos and Son Furniture
Repair Shop where they restored it to what I hope is close to its original
beauty.

I did not know May, of course, but it pleases me every time I
walk by her chair to think of how she might have sat in it holding her babies,
how its graceful lines must have pleased her, how something of her spirit lives
on.